


In the City of Blades and Holdfasts

by fuschia



Category: The Astronaut (song) - Amanda Palmer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Amanda Palmer - Freeform, Angst, F/M, Science Fiction, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 22:33:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuschia/pseuds/fuschia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Growing up, Kepha and I had known no word for astronaut.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the City of Blades and Holdfasts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eudaimon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/gifts).



(1)

Growing up, Kepha and I had known no word for astronaut.

If I had heard such a word as a child, in sunlit days before the sky was sundered, I would have thought first not of stars but of flowers, of prickly-stemmed asters that bloomed, top-heavy and neatly bedded, in the park at the base of the university funicular. Kepha and I had used these flowers in our childhood games, drawing the tips of petals along each other's skin, eyes closed, forced to guess when the petal had reached the curve of a knee, the corner of a mouth, the back of a right arm.

Kepha and I had played a game of astronaut too, even without the words we needed, creating language for ourselves where the gaps remained: the starflight engines, the skyward expeditionaries. Our hands, interlocked, cast shadows of needled-windowed ships against the brass railings of the park, against the yellow and close-cropped grass at our feet.

We learned later that there had been such a word as astronaut, once, just as words remained for asters, for astronomy, words rooted in one of the languages that we had brought with us, across an emptiness, before the City of blades and holdfasts.

By the time we learned the words we needed, though, we had long outgrown our games. We rode the funicular up to the University every day ourselves, barely noticing the faces of the people in the counterbalanced car across the way, our bodies unconsciously swaying in minute adjustment to the rocking motion of the car as it ascended. The heavy textbooks we held in our laps or braced against smeary windows had been the same at first and then divergent, the branching stem-and-leaf plots and arced parabolas of mathematics giving way to the curved script of physics formulae, to the multicolored organs of biology, each organ laid open across the page in tender cross-section, knowable.

In blue-white electric light of lecture halls, Kepha traced and retraced theoretical paths to the sky. In the harsh, clear light of the medical labs, I unspooled and rethreaded the nerves of model animals, first, and then of men and women, reconstructing lost sensations. In the spiral of the Great Library, building and bookshelves coiled around the solar blade that extended above the University arc, we both studied without knowing where our studies could lead: the preparation of the body for the shock of outer atmosphere; the resurrection of stars and starships.

In the close air of a darkroom, the woman I might have been, but was not, studied the functions of light instead of bodies, learned to capture herself, again and again, in photographs: first in black and white, then in tea-stained sepia, then in urgent and oversaturated color. In every self-portrait, she lay dead, shadows folding in around her.

As students, Kepha and I did not speak much about the newfound brevity of the day.

The woman I might have been, but was not, spoke only of the dying light.

(2)

In the years of our training, the long glimmer of the dusk-years, the City of blades and holdfasts entered the carnival month and never came out of it.

No one took down the round-bellied paper lanterns that nested in tree branches or rested on the flat surfaces of the small solar blades or swung from the taut wires that stretched between the riverbank and the holdfasts. No one removed the keys from the boilers beneath the steam calliopes; they would play through the rolling melodies of their songs until their pipes cracked in the coming frost and they wheezed, one by one, into silence.

Kepha and I walked together in the evenings while we could. Once the posters spread through all the branches of the City, everyone knew him, knew his stylized face, reduced in profile to a steady eye, a dark cheek, a long jaw, his head tilted above the text that announced him, simply, as the Astronaut.

In the end, the linguists and scientists at the University had settled on _astronaut_ as the word we would use, though there had been other candidates for revival, each carrying a slightly less or more hopeful vision of how far Kepha would travel: through the air, through the stars, through the universe.

On one night of the unending carnival, we counted the posters as we walked the length of Market Bridge, noted the slight differences and imperfections in the prints: the smudge above an ear, the scratch along a hairline. On one poster, a graffiti artist had sketched rings around Kepha's name, had made him planetary.

"What are you thinking about?" he asked as we walked, our hands grazing.

I pointed to the carnival lights all around us. The lanterns that illuminated the street nearby echoed the colors of the long sunsets – crimson and amber, damson-dark and ember-bright.

"Wondering when they'll take all this down," I said, but that was not the truth. I was wondering what his heartbeat would sound like through the monitors I was designing, how much I would still be able to hear when his body floated starward and mine remained planted among the blades and the holdfasts. I had been listening to his heartbeat all day and thought I could still hear it as we walked, a wet, welcome counterbeat to the grind of the City's engines.

"I don't know," he said. "I kind of like it."

He tapped the foot of a statue as we passed it. A lantern had been tucked behind its bent and solid knee. All of the statues that lined Market Bridge could have been saints or scientists; no one knew for certain. The details that could have told us which – rows of prayer beads, small as seeds, sewn into the seams of clothing, or delicate, multi-lensed instruments gripped in outstretched hands – had long ago eroded. Only the posture of the statues offered a hint, but their featureless faces could have been tilted upwards either in recognition of divinity or in admiration of the City's grand design.

"Maybe," I said, touching the worn base of my favorite statue, the one whom I imagined was a physician, too, whose blank but thoughtfully-turned face and opened arms I found myself imitating as I studied my patients. Patient. Kepha.

As we reached the end of the statues, the end of our count of poster-Kephas, of Astronauts, a young man stopped us, held up the wooden frame of his outdated camera. "Would you mind?" he asked.

"Not at all," Kepha said, and reached to include me, but I stepped away. I liked to stay in the background of photographs, then, unremarkable without my lab coat, anonymous within it.

At the far end of Market Bridge, the woman I might have been, but was not, posed, stock-still and mute, on an emptied plinth, a carnival bride, her body swathed in cloth the cloudy-white color of albumen.

Her face was painted over with the same color, too, her lowered eyelashes clumped with white as though beaded with ice.

 

(3)

In the first full-dark winter, I lost my sense of logic.

The river had frozen solid then, and the snows had come. At first, still in carnival spirits, adults and children alike had improvised sleds from designs found in ancient books, lashing together wooden platforms supported on thin arcs of metal that gleamed with the promise of gash and stitches. To make paths for sledding, they had carried buckets of water to the top of the snow that drifted against the thickest of the holdfasts and poured them out, creating slick ribbons of ice just wide enough to accommodate the sleds' descent.

In the first full-dark winter, both paths and sleds lay forgotten.

The merchants had abandoned Market Bridge by then, too, and built makeshift markets directly upon the frozen river. New streets, laid out entirely on the river, had followed, as heavily traversed as the streets along the lane blades and the lower bridges had once been.

That winter, Kepha and I came down from the blades and holdfasts often, training in the land laboratories, and I could never bring myself to trust the ice completely, even though I knew its depth, knew its strength. The night of the decision, I stopped at the riverbank as Kepha and I began to cross, my body unwilling to move. The ice on the surface of the river seemed strangely dark, the inky churn of water one step away, six inches instead of six feet beneath me.

"Come on," Kepha said, gently, holding a hand out to me.

"In a second."

"It's ok. You _know_ it's frozen solid."

"I know."

I looked across to him. Only his face was visible within the tight hood of his jacket. The lines in the skin around his eyes deepened as he smiled at me. I could have mapped each line of him, then, without looking, mapped his body entirely. I _knew_ him, knew the sweet and acrid smells of his overheating body, knew the fibrous muscle of his upper arm where my hand rested as I gave injections, drew blood, threaded a thousand pathways in and out of him.

I took one step.

The bright paper of a deflated carnival lantern lay frozen just beneath the surface of the ice at my feet, a drop of blood pressed against a microscope slide.

Kepha stepped forward and grabbed my hand in his. I could barely feel the contact through the thickness of our gloves.

"You know I wouldn't trust anyone else with this," he said, shrugging in his jacket to indicate his body, before tipping his chin, once, sharply, towards the sky. "Who else could get me up there safely, keep me there?"

"I know."

I knew.

I was still not getting what I wanted.

In my studies, once, I had plotted the paths of systemic circulation onto outlines of our bodies: on one side of the page stood my body, aflame with aortic red, and, on the other side of the page, his body, cool-blue and venous. The system was complete only when I folded the paper in on itself, made it small enough to fit inside a book, and our faceless, sketched bodies touched, chest to chest, limb to limb.

I was still not getting what I wanted.

Standing on the ice, cold air astringent against the exposed skin of our faces, Kepha and I could hear the minor chords of music from a dozen cabarets that lined Market Bridge now, illicit clubs that had sprung up in the abandoned stores and storerooms. The City had thrown off its carnival age and embraced something newer, darker. In one cabaret, somewhere far along the bridge, the woman that I might have been, but was not, painted a different face over her own, an arabesque of eyebrows, laceration-red circles over her cheekbones, and sung in a voice as powerful as a scream.

 

(4)

In the brief, bright hours of the launch window, the City of blades and holdfasts looked like itself again, living to marvel at its own configuration, bristling with heroes ready to respark the sky.

As we marched upwards to the launch, our footsteps kept rhythm first with the throb of the City below and then, as we ascended, with the spin of the engines in the ship above. On the high platform blade the starship thrummed in its resurrected design, each instrument within it as familiar to Kepha's mind as the systems of his body, mapped and monitored, were to mine.

We passed upwards through the crowds and the banners and the brief morning light. The City receded below us as we climbed, and soon we could see down past the snapped funicular lines, past the barren and blossomless parks, past Market Bridge with its saints or scientists, past the emptied shops and cabarets, all the way down to the still-frozen river.

The woman I might have been, but was not, marched alongside us, bare-faced and martial, wearing her gold-threaded cabaret corset like a breastplate.

There was time, still, to discover the torsion of the fallen body, to reconstruct the stories that still threaded through the nerves, to embrace each Astronaut who was to come.

For that moment, marching, we remained heroic.

As we turned the final corner of the climb, I reached out to touch the back of Kepha's right arm, but my fingers barely grazed the thick cloth there, and he did not turn back.

**Author's Note:**

> I am your original Yuletide writer and I just wanted to say that I was so thrilled to get your requests. I was very inspired by your ideas for this fic, though I found that Amanda Palmer's words and images led me to a world that was more steampunk than I first expected. Thank you for the opportunity to explore this song!


End file.
